Customer Reviews

Sanctuary: An Epic Novel of Thieves' World (Thieves' World / [Created by Robert Lynn Asprint & Lynn Abbe)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm a big fan of the original series, Thieves' World, which ended with its twelfth book over a decade ago. When I'd finished the last page of the last book of Thieves' World, I'd experienced for the first time what I would come to judge all other books by. That bittersweet feeling of a triumphant conclusion to a great story mingled with slight sorrow at the parting with its characters.

So I started Sanctuary with apprehensions. One of them being that this book was written by a single author, while Thieves' World was a shared-world-anthology by multiple writers which created a uniqueness with universal appeal. The other issue that troubled me was that inside flap had informed me that my favorite characters were no longer around.

Just like any place a person comes to love, I wasn't sure I'd like going back when the very things I'd enjoyed the most had changed.

However, Abbey skillfully proves true that "the more things change the more they stay the same". As with any famous city, or in this case, infamous city, Sanctuary pulses with a life all her own. Previous generations leave their mark and the new rise up only to soon become part of the legend themselves.

Whether this is a return visit or your first time in this notorious city, be wary. The reader is quickly seduced by the sinful charm of Sanctuary's intriguingly seedy taverns like the Vulgar Unicorn, the shadowy allies of the Maze, and her dangerous ghettos such as the waterfront district.

If you're a fan of Thieves' World, you're sure to enjoy your return visit as much as I have. If you haven't read Thieves' World, this book is great introduction. It's a whole new story in a dark, old city. Abbey gives you just enough history so you'll learn a little of what your getting into while the veterans get a reminder.

Keep your money-purse close, dagger closer and trust few. Sanctuary has no mercy, even more so for visitors.

This volume is the relaunch to the Thieves World shared universe created by Abbey and Robert Asprin, which, as I recall, fired up around 1979 or so and ran through the '80s before sputtering to a halt. Thieves World was the precursor to such later series as George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards, C.J. Cherryh's Merovingen Nights, and Will Shetterly and Emma Bull's Liavek. The present volume picks up some years after the events of the twelfth installment of the original series. (In addition to the anthologies and mosaic novels, there seem to have been five stand-alone novels by the dreaded Janet and Chris Morris, against whom I continually rail, inasmuch as I hold their vile contributions to be directly responsible for killing both Thieves World and Merovingen Nights. Be that as it may, their five books evidently dealt with the despicable Tempus and his cronies and I believe they largely took place outside of the city of Sanctuary itself.)

Most everyone the longtime fan knew from back in the day is dead, fled, or vanished. Pretty much the only major figure left is an eighty-year-old Molin Torchholder, and due to circumstances he has to more or less dictate his memoirs in a nifty little ploy that allows the old school readers to dredge up memories of the first series while giving new readers a bit of background on the setting. This device makes it pretty apparent how wildly out of control the series had become and how critical it is to have a strong editorial hand (such as Martin) at the helm to reject the stupider ideas. My opinion is that very few of the authors could content themselves with "writing small" and with telling quiet little tales of interesting but limited and flawed characters. Very rapidly, after the first couple of books, every contributer wanted to turn their amps up to 11, and so each new character became deadlier, angrier, and more brutal than the last, and each of them seemed designed specifically as grudge monsters who were meant only to humiliate or eliminate the pre-existing characters. Not to mention that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as it were, rode through the city so often that it became ludicrous. Authors began to show off and have gods duking it out in the street, or had the city invaded again and again by awesome new and never-before-suspected threats from all quarters of the globe, or tossed in legions of the undead or bands of invincible and sneering warriors. In hearing Molin relate the whole sorry mess, it just really seems ludicrous in retrospect.

This particular addition to the milieu is a necessary but somewhat awkward bridge between the decades-old material accumulated over the first run of the series and the new tales that follow in the newest collection of short stories (entitled Turning Points) that has just become available. (Another volume, First Blood, will be rolling out soon.) Quite likely, it can be skipped, and it may only really be compelling reading for continuity devotees who need to acquire each Thieves World volume for their collections.

Now that Abbey has cleaned the slate by jumping the series into the future so that everyone has keeled over or wandered off, Thieves World can enjoy a fresh start and avoid the mistakes of the past. In Cauvin and Bec, the Thieves World setting has a couple of interesting characters to serve as a starting point, with the help of some of the supporting cast, such as Soldt. Here's hoping that Abbey can prevent future contributors under control so that Sanctuary will not again implode under the weight of overly ambitious and byzantine plots and the hordes of grandiose heroes and villains.

and here is not just the first novel but the first book of the new generation of books about the old city. Molin Torchholder, survivor of wars, magic battles and all the dangers of the city itself, has killers on his tail. Good ones. With the help of the cursing Cauvin, the son of a stoneyard owner, and Cauvin's younger bother, Bec, Molin MIGHT be able to protect Sanctuary before he dies. But it'll be a close one.
I took away a few stars for many reasons. Cauvin cusses too frogging much, seems a tad too slow and, in a character driven plot line, it just seemed the author used his slowness to add a few hundred extra pages. The book is 533 pages long and much of it is Cauvin trying to think of what to do when not cussing his bad luck.
Also, there was a lot of information about the past - we learn about the Hand, but also about events that happened in the first books. A lot of names are dropped - Tempus, Jubal, Kadakithis and even Hakiem - which fans, old or new, may enjoy. But all these scenes seemed more like a data dump to me and slowed the action, what little there was, down. The story didn't even really start to move till the last few chapters.
It can't be helped - a story needs a starting point, a foundation. You have to cook the meal before you eat it. After all, this is the first book of the return to the world of 'Thieves' World' and I would suggest reading this one first. But it is still long, slightly boring in some parts and throws a lot of both old history and not-so-old history at you.
For fans it is a must, but once done I doubt you'll wish to re-read.

Lynn Abbey has resurrected Sanctuary from Thieves World again. She has started a new series based on the old and needed a crossover book to bring the old readers up to date and try and fill in the back ground for the new readers. The only character from the "old" series is Molin Torchholder and he is in trouble. He has enlisted a new character named Cauvin and his younger brother Bec to help him.

The book revolves around a cult of murderers that has returned to Sanctuary from the past and they are out to kill Molin. At this point in the book, Molin is very old and the past is in the distant past with all of the old characters gones with the exception of one that makes a brief period at the end of the book.

"Sanctuary" is a very good crossover from the original series to the new. While the book nevers goes into great detail about the past, the reader is getting a nice thumbnail that covers the general storyline. As all brief descriptions, much is left out for brevity, but the very base is there. Abbey has done a good job of making the new book read like the old series and that could not have been easy.

The old characters are mentioned, but much like all history they are not really remebered right except by those of us that read the original series. I suggest that you read or reread the original series because you will be surprised how much you forget, but if you do not want to return to the past you do not need to either. Highly Recommended.

Time has passed. Molin Torchholder is dying. He picks an heir, or to be precise the Gods seem to pick his heir, a boy named Cauvin who is just growing into a man. It is an interesting tale of the passing of a torch and, as in all the tales of thieves world, there is the usual array of villains. The Vulgar Unicorn has survived, of course, and is still a meeting ground. The Red Light District has fallen on hard times. Trade has declined, but occasional ships still show up in the harbor. Sanctuary is somewhat down at the heels, and the coinage is debased.

This is an interesting tale about the battle against an evil cult, but it has flashbacks to earlier times. For someone who has not read the other novels, the information is fragmentary. For someone who has read the novels, and is fully familiar with the setting, the digressions into the past seem to be overdone and distracting.

The story does not quite reach a full conclusion as one of the evil people escapes. One can guess that the author is planning a sequel. In Thieves World, there are always stories to be told.

Shared worlds often suffer from the problem of a major theme emerging and all the stories turning to that theme, even if that means sacrificing something along the way. Somewhere around the sixth book or so of the Thieve's World series, I felt that some of what I enjoied most about the stories had been lost as an overall story arc developed.
When I bought Sanctuary, I was not optimistic, but I remembered the early stories fondly enough to take the risk. Boy, am I glad I did! Not only did I enjoy the book once I got into it, but the flashbacks to Sanctuary's past make me think that I should go back a read all the stuff I mssed in the original series.

*spoiler alert - if you haven't read any of the previous anthologies, and plan to, some of the information below could be considered spoilers*

Way back in the 1980's, several authors entered into an ongoing collaboration on a fantasy series which eventually came to be called Thieves' World. Long before the gritty, realistic and, perhaps, perverse protagonists written by GRR Martin, Robert Jordan, Greg Keyes and R. Scott Baker written in revolt of so-called "stock characters" so prevalent in fantasy, Robert Asprin and Lynn Abbey's world was populated with heroes but predominantly rogues in the "cess pit of the Empire", the city of Sanctuary. For those overdosed on the stock characters promulgated by, predominantly, the success of Tolkien, the denizens of Sanctuary were all too human (even if not completely human, themselves) in their desires and pursuit of self interest. Several parts the rankest districts of Rome, and a large part main street Sodom and Gomorrah, one always knew when starting a chapter that you would meet only the most interesting of characters in the pages to come, surrounded by their only slightly less fascinating fellows in a city where one had to be smarter and more devious than everyone else just to make it through the day, else end up meat in a gutter or, worse, a pawn in the schemes of the more competent manipulators in the city. Imagine New York, with all the water, sewage, subway and financial services shut down for a day (and the resultant frustration and madness), and you have every day in Sanctuary.

In contrast to the popular and prevalent high-medieval settings of the day, Thieves' World was, at latest, analogous to the late pre-Christian Roman Empire. As one would expect in a series with several authors, each composing a separate chapter in the several thousand pages of the story, the writing could be uneven at times. Regardless, it was never a case of too many cooks spoiling the soup.

While it would be inaccurate to say Thieves' World wasn't filled with stock characters, initially, it was what the various authors turned these main points of view archetypes into that kept readers coming back for more. The heroic, undefeatable soldier became the serial rapist (and closet homosexual), while the wicked witch/necromater became the façade of a coquettish mage with a (very, very) deeply buried heart of gold. The slaver/crime boss became the patriot, the shape-changing mage with immeasurable power a pawn to his anyone who fed his sex addiction, and the benevolent but tough-as-nails mage as belonging to a monastic doomsday cult and a transsexual lesbian.

Sadly, the series stopped rolling out installments in the mid-1990's.

*spoilers for previous anthologies end here*

In Sanctuary, the novel by Abbey from 2005, we return to the mean streets of an even more ravaged city for a much needed update. The cult of the mother goddess, Dyreela, has been expelled and, seemingly, eradicated, allowing the denizens of Sanctuary a tentative breath of relief. Molin Torchholder, former high priest and architect of Vashanka (god of war and storms), discovers a vengeful remnant of the cult, however, and scrambles furiously to complete certain plans and set others into motion in order to protect the city he detests with a passion. Caught up in his plans are Cauvin, formerly a novice of the bloodiest of Dyreela's splinter cults and rescued from death by Molin 15 years before, and Bec, his brother through Cauvin's adoptive family. Cauvin is essentially trained as a thug, and puts his former training to use breaking ruined mansions up for stone to sell through his adoptive father, while Bec is the sheltered child fascinated by his brother's more visceral abilities while remaining confident in his own abilities as a scholar. As Molin, Cauvin and Bec wind their way through the story, we catch up with the stories of those characters prevalent in the previous five anthologies of the series, some of whose ultimate fates proved a bit anticlimactic.

Unlike previous Thieves' World installments, this story is concluded within the pages of one volume, and is written solely by the one author (Abbey). As a result, it's also a frenetic page-turner, my having read all of the approximately 500 pages in a day. The level of action, detail and sheer genius of the writing is akin to the best of that of the previous various anthologies.

If you enjoyed GRR Martin, Greg Keyes or R Scott Baker, and haven't read any of the Thieves' World series, definitely give it a go if you can find an extant copy - the first anthology was entitled, similarly, Sanctuary, published in 1982 and consisting of Thieves' World (1979), Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn (1980) and Shadows of Sanctuary (1981). Sadly, not having read at least 2 of the anthologies (the second being Turning Points, of 1986), you're likely to find the tales in the Abbey novel much ado about folks who mean nothing to you. However, if you have read any of the series, and missed the colorful yet bleak denizens of the Empire's most insignificant city, you'll relish every page, as I did.

Sanctuary has a long history of war, but to the residents of today that is in its glorious and ignominious past. The heroes and villains are dead with one exception Lord Molin Torcholder, keeper of the secrets. However, he too nears the end as evil has returned and mortally assassinated him.

Before he dies, Molin must name his successor and transfer his power and secrets to this individual so that Thieves' World regains its equilibrium. Molin depends on Cauvin and preadolescent Bec aided by Soldt to complete his quest. However, their enemy Dyareela, the Mother of Chaos, is a powerful opponent seemingly stronger than the dying Molin and his trio of saviors as her followers are growing rapidly.

SANCTUARY is an exciting Thieves' World entry that is more for long time fans though a newcomer with perseverance and stamina will relish the full effect of the tale and want to read the myriad of sword and sorcery anthologies and novels previously published. The story line is loaded with action yet contains strong characters, especially Cauvin and Bec. Though the history lessons of this realm provide background material for the novice visitor, it slows down the impact of the plot for the experienced traveler. With patience, new and old readers will enjoy Lynn Abbey's latest Thieves' World journey.

Harriet Klausner